


I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You

by gamerfic



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Afterlife, Children, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4083406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/pseuds/gamerfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nux waits for Capable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You

Of all the luxuries Nux has discovered in this new place, time is the one that surprises him the most. Before, in the wasteland, in the dark hot stinking tunnels of the Citadel, everything always happened with a fast-burning fuse attached. Drive the rig back from the Bullet Farm before the guzzoline runs out. Kill the buzzards before they kill you. Die historic and reach Valhalla before the night fevers and your own treacherous body can take you first, inglorious and slow. None of that happens here now. In fact, nothing much ever seems to happen here at all. The days stretch out before him now like endless asphalt, and he can follow them out in any direction and see what he finds along the way.

At first it's all too quiet, too still. Nux idles as rough as the pursuit vehicles that used to shudder all in rows at the base of the Citadel tower, their engines never tuned for anything but open road and open throttle. But when the collision he's waiting for never comes, when the gauges never show empty, he starts to ease up, to look around, to wonder. This place can't be Valhalla - there are no feast halls, no Immortan Joe, no parties of half-crazed war boys screaming endlessly out into the night - but he reckons that's not where he'd choose to end up anymore anyway. He comes to understand that this is something like the Green Place the wives had spoken of in reverent whispers in the cab of the war rig - only better, and eternal, if he wants it to be.

This Green Place is everything the wives said it would be, and more. It's a vast oasis in the middle of an even vaster desert, where the cold clear waters never run dry or bitter, where food abounds in flavors and varieties he never could have dreamed up. There are cars here - for Nux it would be no kind of paradise if he couldn't get his hands black with the inside of an engine when he wanted - but not for war parties. These machines always run smooth and purring and he can race them out across the white sands if he likes, with nobody chasing him and nothing in front of him but the wind in his face and pure joyful freedom all around him.

Other people call this Green Place home. They're kind and soft and peaceful and it doesn't surprise him that he doesn't recognize most of them. It also doesn't surprise him that the Splendid Angharad is there. Her belly is flat now, her pale skin unscarred. Sometimes she holds a baby in her arms or cradles it to her breast, looking down at its sleeping features for hours. Other times she sits in the shade of a tree and watches the same boy at play, grown all of a sudden into a gangly little blond pup whose looks are all Angharad and no Joe. When she first notices Nux, her eyes widen in astonishment and she shies away reflexively. He understands. But as time passes and she sees that he isn't about to do whatever it is she expects a war boy to do, she lets him come closer, lets him tell her about what happened after she fell from the war rig and everything started to change.

He lets her tell him stories, too. "You figure everyone ends up here eventually?" he asks her one day as they sit dangling their feet in a cool stream. Angharad's pup is splashing in the shallows nearby, playing with some others who Nux vaguely remembers didn't live to see much beyond the Citadel. Their shrieks of happiness echo up into the cloudless blue sky. "The ones who don't go to Valhalla when they die, I mean."

"I don't know," Angharad says. "But maybe people end up in this place because they needed something from it. Something they didn't get when they were alive." Her gaze flickers toward the laughing, flailing bunch of pups kicking water at each other. "At least that's how it was for me."

"Mmm," Nux replies, and falls back onto the mossy banks of the stream. He hopes she's right. He already knows what he needs.

So after that, he mostly just waits. It isn't difficult; without Larry and Barry, without the constant hum of pain that used to rumble beneath the floorboards of his life, it's easy just to let the days float by, lost in the feeling of not living in a body that always hurts. He keeps one eye open for new arrivals to the Green Place. Once they've settled in, he listens to their tales of the lives they left behind, then asks if they know anything about the Citadel. None of them ever do.

He thinks about Capable all the time. The sound of her voice, the brush of her fingers tracing along his ear, the firm warm weight of her when she slept against his shoulder. That second night under the stars at the edge of the salt flats, tender and fumbling and over so quickly that he tells himself he must have imagined it. He turns his memories of her over in his mind until each one is as familiar to him as the outline of the V8 scarred onto his chest. He wonders if she's happy now. He wonders if she thinks of him the same.

Other times he catches himself wishing she would get here faster. Whenever he does, he groans and thumps his head down on the soft green earth, squeezing his eyes tight shut to will the thought away. He gave up his half-life so she could have a full one. He wants her to use it up down to the very last drop in the tank, to do with it exactly as she pleases without any warlords treating her like a thing, even more than he wants her here. To ask for anything else would make everything that came before just mediocre, unworthy of being witnessed by anyone.

But time keeps passing, and no one is immortal, and when Imperator Furiosa shows up at the Green Place he knows he won't have to wait much longer. He worries she'll ride at the front of a great throng of the dead, evidence of her Citadel's fall, but instead she walks in from the desert alone. She looks just like she did the last time Nux saw her, mechanical arm and all, and he already knows she won't stay. Her eyes keep casting out toward the horizon, and he sees how this place rubs and chafes against her like trying to wear a dead man's ill-fitting boots. Maybe she left too much of herself on the Fury Road and she has to go get it back. Or maybe her Green Place is still wandering out there in the desert in the form of something or someone else.

Nux approaches Furiosa as soon as he gets the chance. She recognizes him right away, knows what he's going to ask and starts to answer it before he's even done opening his mouth. "She lived, Nux," Furiosa says. "We all did. And we remembered."

With those words something turns over inside him, an engine rebuilt and roaring back to life. It has to be plain as tires kicking up dust clouds on a clear day, because a slight and unexpected smile is tugging at the corners of her mouth too. He's never seen an Imperator do that before. There's so much more he wants to ask, but the only thing he finds to say is, "A full life, yeah?"

Furiosa's answering nod is slight, barely perceptible, but it's enough. "None of it was wasted," she says, and Nux closes his eyes against the tears that want to come. When he opens them, she's gone. He never sees her again.

After that, there's more waiting, but it's different, lighter somehow. Nux lets himself scan the horizon more often, torn as always between wanting Capable with him and wanting her alive. He lets himself begin to hope like he never could in life. And finally, one day, he sees her walking slowly across the desert, toward the Green Place, toward him.

At first he thinks she must be a mirage. He's been fooled before by the shimmering heat and by his own longing heart. But dusk is approaching, and the air and ground are cooling, and she keeps getting larger in his vision and more solid with every step she takes. Her red hair is streaming out behind her in the breeze, like a plume of colored smoke from a flare, calling him home. Nux scrambles up from the rock he's been sitting on and runs to her. He staggers and stumbles in the soft sand, clumsy as ever, until he trips and falls flat. He's starting to pick himself up when he feels a gentle touch on his shoulder and looks up at last into Capable's face.

Up close, Nux can tell she's changed. On the surface she's the same as she was when he lifted his head up out of the sand to see her soaked and frightened beside the war rig, but when he looks closer he sees flickers of the other women she became after he had gone - Capable with a pup in her arms and another clinging shyly to her hip, Capable with a rifle in her hands and her hair shorn for battle, Capable as a frail old woman with leathery skin and wise eyes. She holds out her hand to him and he takes it. The strip of gauzy fabric that he tore from her dress all those years ago is still tied around his wrist. It flutters like her hair as she pulls him to his feet.

Capable looks past him, to the Green Place, and says, "But this can't be Valhalla."

"No," Nux says. "It's better."

Her eyes are back on him now, wide and wet. "Have you been here all this time?"

"You were awaited," he says. He hears her breath catch in her throat and she goes up on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his mouth, lingering and slow.

Then she pulls away and resumes walking, not letting go of his hand, and he trails along after her. "You made it, then?" he asks. "To your own green place? After I-"

"We made it," she says, cutting him off as if she doesn't want to be reminded of that last desperate chase. "We built it, I mean. The Green Citadel. I wish you could have seen it."

"So do I." They're quiet for a while, their feet crunching in the sand, and when Nux speaks again his voice is softer. "And was it good? Your life back there?"

"It was," she says, and the relief he feels is so intense it threatens to knock him right back flat on the ground.

"Was it that way for everyone?" Nux asks, remembering the other wives, the Wretched, the war pups crowded into their kennels - all those people he never used to give a second glance, who somehow became all he can think about (other than Capable) once he had the time.

"Not like what you have here." For a moment, Capable's face is that old woman's again, its deep lines carved by hard memories remembered too well. "It's not perfect. There's still war, and sickness. Too many people still die too soon. We've worked so hard to make it better, but I'm not sure it's enough. The world may be too poisoned now to ever grow back green. There might not be enough of us left to fix it." She draws in a deep, shuddering breath. "But we can't know for sure. So we have to try, right? We can at least be good to each other until the last fire goes out. We can at least remember that we're all people, not things." They've stopped walking now and she's turned to him with a strange, sad look in her eyes. It's the most he's ever heard her say at once and he thinks he could listen to her talk like this forever. "I have to do that much for the ones who will be there after me. For my children. And for our daughter, too."

It takes him a while to realize what she means. He never dreamed of such a thing, didn't know it was possible, and he can't put a name to the feeling the knowledge stirs in him. "I had a daughter," he says, stupefied.

Capable nods. "And our daughter had daughters, later on. Grandchildren, Toast said people used to call them."

"Grandchildren," Nux repeats, the word unfamiliar and heavy in his mouth. Then he feels his face brighten in the grip of a sudden idea. "I want to meet them all! Can I-"

"Not for a long time, I hope."

Only then does he realize what he's asking and how it must sound to her. Without thinking, he pulls his hand out of hers, balls it into a fist, starts pummeling his own temples out of habit. "Oh, foolish-!"

But Capable seizes his wrist and he lets her pull his arm down. With her other hand she reaches up and strokes the back of his head, and he leans into her touch just like he did on that first night in the back of the war rig so long ago. "Don't," she says. "I know how you meant it. And I reckon you will get to meet them someday."

"Shiny," Nux says, still not thinking, and her laughter sounds like water flowing freely down rocks. She puts her hand in his again and they go back to walking. He can see she's spinning something around in her head now like wheels stuck in a mire, always moving but never getting anywhere. "What's on your mind?"

"I didn't only have our daughter," Capable says almost before he's finished speaking. "I had others too, with other people. After you were gone."

"Oh." Something flares up in him like guzzoline burning, a brief burst of jealousy when he imagines all the ways she lived without him. A half-life for a full, he reminds himself, and binding yourself to someone dead and gone doesn't sound like any kind of freedom he can name. So he means it down to his bones when he tells her, "I'm happy you did."

"How did you get so kind?" she asks, and he doesn't know, so he doesn't answer. They've found the place where the desert gives way to green, and Capable crouches down beside a stream and drinks deep. She pulls a ripe fruit down from a branch that hangs low over the water, amazed by the ease with which it yields to her. Her eyes close in ecstasy at the first bite, and she passes it over to Nux to share.

"Tell me about our daughter," he says when the fruit is gone. "Tell me everything I missed."

Capable frowns. "There's a lot to tell. I don't know where to start."

"Try the beginning," Nux says, and reaches for her. "We have all the time in the world."

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman:
> 
> _I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,  
>  If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles._
> 
> _You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,  
>  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,  
> And filter and fibre your blood._
> 
> _Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,  
>  Missing me one place search another,  
> I stop somewhere waiting for you._


End file.
